“Drip” is the term used to describe the inner margins of a book's pages, a space that is rarely used because it is in the abyss of the fold. But it's also a word used to describe the spaces between vignettes in comics - but, more than a technical term, this collective saw in the word, according to Biakosta, a reading of “taking advantage of the space in the margins”. The collective was founded by Biakosta, Rita Mota and Margarida Ferreira - all former students at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto whose careers took them in opposite directions.

The motivation for creating the Goteira collective was to create an artistic project that would bring them back together. Although they were all active in illustration and animation, it was comics that seemed to be gathering increasing enthusiasm among the founders. “There aren't many moments when it's possible to get people together to talk about comics, with the exception of illustration fairs, which bring a lot of artists together,” Rita points out. So the collective was founded as a way of setting up a comics discussion club - but from an early stage there was the ambition of a more tangible materialization: “we already wanted to do a comics anthology - with work by the three of us, but also with guest artists. We just didn't want to put ourselves in the position of inviting people to give up their work for nothing,” Bia recalls.

It is in this context that Criatório, the municipal program to support artistic creation, emerged as a catalyst, leading them to apply for the production of a comics anthology. With the success of this application, they opened an open call for artists at the beginning of last year, resulting in the book “Quem É Que Tu Pensas Que És?” (Who Do You Think You Are?), which features unpublished works by 12 artists.

Regarding the title, Margarida decodes a meaning that is both figurative and literal: “these 12 artists were invited to talk about identity and their own notion of self, but also to ask what they think makes them comic book creators - who do you think you are to be making comics?”

It's in a store in the Brasília shopping center, between corridors that bifurcate at different angles, that we find the Bedeteca premises. This space was inaugurated at the beginning of last year, but Bedeteca considers it only its second act. This is because the history of Bedeteca itself is closely linked to the history of comic books in Porto. The first step began in the 80s with the Ramalde Youth Commission and the fanzine “Comicarte”, as Júlio Moreira, a member of the current board and already present in the structure since the 90s, recalls.

“I was more involved with the film section of the Youth Organisations Support Fund, but I knew Paulo Amorim and Pedro Cleto, from “Comicarte”, which in the meantime had started organizing a fanzine and comic salon,” recalls Júlio Moreira. The Salão BD, which became a national reference and took over the Ferreira Borges Market as its regular venue, is a memory that is still very present among comic book aficionados. It's also the driving force behind Júlio's even greater attachment to the format. “In 1992, Paulo Amorim had to choose between a career in medicine or the Salão BD; so I, José Rui Fernandes, who owns the Mundo Fantasma store, Pedro Petracchi [who is now also on the board of Bedeteca] and a few other people took over the salon, turned it around and kept it going until 2001.”

Along the way, the collection that the Ramalde Youth Commission was accumulating took shape with the idea of a Bedeteca that, in addition to preserving this material archive, would have the mission of defending and promoting comics. Almost thirty years later, the mission remains unchanged in the rebirth of the Bedeteca project, while the collection aims to transform itself more and more: “The initial collection is from the 80s and 90s, but we've already started to receive various donations, both from national publishers, with whom we've already asked to collaborate, and from private individuals - we've even received an entire collection from someone in the Azores!”

At the moment, one of Bedeteca's most regular activities is the Mercado do Contra, also organized by Fernando Pau-Preto, another member of the current board, who stresses that, as well as being a comic book self-publishing fair, this market “has been bringing in leading Portuguese authors, but with work published for the big publishers, such as DC Comics and Marvel”. “We've already had Jorge Coelho and André Lima Araújo here,” he adds. They also organize guided tours of exhibitions and host the aforementioned meetings of the Goteira collective. The intimacy with the Mundo Fantasma store allows them to draw a triangle between these two spaces (and their respective collections) and the exhibition space integrated into the Mundo Fantasma space.

The Mundo Fantasma store is more than unavoidable: it's almost synonymous with comic books in the city of Porto. The fact that it is the largest comic book store in Portugal certainly contributes to this. But most of Mundo Fantasma's prestige comes from the two people who have been welcoming visitors since the late 1990s: Marco Novais and Vasco Carmo. This duo manages the feat of having the keys to each and every niche within comics, but at the same time they don't behave like gatekeepers, keeping out those who aren't yet initiated in this art - they work, in fact, as entry points for comics neophytes: it's very difficult for anyone who enters the store not to leave without two or three tailor-made recommendations.

These “human algorithms” work in a very organic way, since the basic principle is, according to Vasco, “to treat customers as you would like to be treated” - something much easier to do when the person behind the counter could just as easily be on the other side, looking for a good suggestion. They both claim to be cultural omnivores, but Marco adds that he “certainly has more eyes than belly”. “But a library is a bit like a wine cellar, you don't have to drink all the wine. And it's also a pleasure to look at some well-stocked shelves.”

This chasm of having more books than time to read them makes the service of recommending works to customers even more necessary. “If the person has similar tastes to you, it helps a lot because you're introducing them to things you've already read and like,” says Vasco. Despite this, they swear that they don't share custody of their clients, nor do they hunt for those they would like to have “in their portfolio”: “this is something that happens quite organically, not least because clients always feel more comfortable talking to those who have similar tastes.”

This year, Mundo Fantasma celebrates 30 years of existence - originally installed in the Parque Itália shopping center, it moved to Brasília two years later, where it remains today (albeit with a recent change of store space within the mall). The rhythm has been stable for some time: the store receives the mythical “monthly order” from the big publishers, which includes the new editions of the series that customers subscribe to - and customers come in to pick up the news, and give Marco and Vasco a couple of letters.

The person who benefited from Vasco and Marco's seminal recommendations was Rudolfo da Silva. Today, he is a multidisciplinary artist who crosses the bulk of his work in comics with video games, music and even sculpture. But once upon a time, he was a young Yu-Gi-Oh! card game aficionado who first entered a place he had been recommended to find cards - the Mundo Fantasma store in the Brasília shopping center. However, “the cards were sold out, but I started reading a manga magazine and got hooked on the whole comic book thing,” recalls Rudolfo.

Any comic book villain or hero has his origins: it was when he saw his application for a prize at the 18th edition of Amadora BD fail that he began to think about self-publishing as a way of getting his art out to readers. “I'm 34 now and I'm still making fanzines like I did when I was 16,” he jokes. But is it exactly the same way? Rudolfo first created the independent publisher Ruru Comix, and later Palpable Press, and today he is also an active member of the independent publisher Chili Com Carne, and has been avant-garde in the format of distributing works to online subscribers on crowdfunding platforms. Even so, there is an older but safer method: “I feel that in Portugal fairs are still more profitable. It's different for a buyer to be in front of an author, and not just looking at a JPEG.”

The feverish style of Rudolfo's art, all besieged by implausible muscles, sweat and screaming, is on the surface a pastiche of influences and pop culture (it's not impossible to see a kind of pumped-up Pikachu strolling through downtown Porto, on his way to meet a Sonic the Hedgehog character), but it reveals a concern with more mundane dramas, such as the impossibility of meeting living costs on an artist's income. Rudolfo notes that “the only people he knows who make a living exclusively from this work for the big publishers, like Marvel and DC”. “In those models, you have the support of large teams, they can produce 30 pages in a week. I, working alone, can spend a week making a page that people read in two minutes,” he says.

As for the future, Rudolfo points the way with some irony: “since the Directorate General for Books, Archives and Libraries has decided to end the only grant they had for comics, I think I'm going to set up the Rudolfo da Silva Foundation to encourage the creation and publishing of comics.”

Just by its name, Livraria Timtim por Timtim tells you what it's all about: a comic book store with a strong focus on Franco-Belgian comics, with a Portuguese accent. Alberto Gonçalves, a well-known figure among collectors, has always been in charge. Not that Alberto identifies himself as a collector, because “any book I have is for use, to sit down and read”. Nor does he consider Timtim por Timtim to be a bookshop. Deep down, he admits that the bookshop is a childhood fantasy: “This is like being a movie actor or a television presenter. These are professions in which, when Sunday night comes, you don't feel sad because it's Monday and you have to work”.

Alberto's childhood of fantasies was filled with the so-called “macacada”: “People of my generation might not have liked or read comics very much, but it was something that was part of everyone's daily life, simply because there was no TV or computer games back then. We turned to what the adults called 'macacada', which was something that made the educators mad - especially because the translations we had were all in Brazilian Portuguese, and then we'd make mistakes in our writing.”

After his childhood, Alberto did his military service in Cascais (“a paradisiacal place, and I saw a lot of movies at the Quarteto and the Cinemateca, but also at the 25 escudos machines that showed films of women dancing”), and embarked on a long sequence of jobs: from teacher to manager of a civil engineering company. But it was only with the store that he found the ideal solution: a job without a boss.

The name, “Timtim por Timtim”, comes from an article in the hugely popular Tintin magazine. But it could easily have been called something else: “The iconic comic books of my generation had names like O Mosquito, Coleção Águia, Coleção Papagaio. I almost called it Loja do Falcão”. The store started out in a space in Rua da Constituição, soon after moved to Rua de General Silveira, but about 20 years ago it found its permanent home in Rua Conceição.